Traces of Mukachevo's Czechoslovakian past can still be found in the city. (During the interwar period, Mukachevo along with the rest of Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia) was part of Czechoslovakia.)

"In 1883, Antonín
Kunz (1859–1910) founded
a company in Hranice [Czech Republic] for the repair and production of small farm machinery and
then specialized in the production of windpumps and
other pumps. The company became the largest factory for water pumps in
Austria-Hungary. At the end of the 19th century, it also produced complete
communal water systems (by 1912 it had done so for 1,056 towns and
municipalities, as well as factories and large landowners)" (from Wikipedia).

Here's
an advertisement for Antonín Kunz's company “První moravská továrna na
vodovody a pumpy, Antonín Kunz v Hranicích” (The First Moravian Water Pipe and
Pump Factory), which built Mukachevo’s water supply system and installed its
fire hydrants in 1935.

A documentary film was recently released about the dying tradition of shepherding in the Carpathian Mountains. The film, called The Living Fire (Жива Ватра), was directed by my acquaintance Ostap Kostyuk

"ЖИВА ВАТРА" (The Living Fire)
Ukraine, 2014, 77’
"A four-year-long project documenting three generations of
Ukrainian Carpathian shepherds in their struggle to keep the age-old trade
alive in the face of contemporary changes."
"It is a film about pitiless daily labor that knows no
weekends, a harmonious world that we’ve lost in our search for comfort, and the
childhood that is left behind when one takes on the role of an adult…"

Last month, Smithsonian Folkways released an album of ancient songs from the Chornobyl region, songs all but forgotten due to the nuclear disaster that wiped out the nearby villages.

Fortunately, some of these songs have been preserved thanks to ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov and Ensemble Hilka: "Under the musical direction of Yevhen Yefremov, an ethnomusicologist and singer whose field expeditions into Kyivan Polissia (“the Chornobyl Zone”) began in the 1970s and have continued to the present day, Ensemble Hilka presents the sketch of a ritual year as a song cycle that may have been performed in a typical Polissian village for centuries leading up to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster in 1986."

The project is called "Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World." More information can be found on the Smithsonian Folkways website.

In the diaspora I grew up singing certain Ukrainian folk songs, which I thought every Ukrainian in Ukraine knew, so I was surprised to find out that it wasn't true. I grew up in a community made mostly of descendants of Galician immigrants and was a member of the scouting organization Plast — two facts which largely influenced the musical culture I was exposed to. Many of the popular songs in this diaspora community are Galician, Hutsul, and especially Lemko, as well as kozak, Sichovi Striltsi, UPA, and Plast songs, and of course songs composed by Volodymyr Ivasiuk (which are just as popular in Ukraine as in the diaspora). Some of the songs we sing seem to have been somewhat forgotten in Ukraine for one reason or another — maybe partly because we were more free to sing our folk and patriotic songs in the diaspora than Ukrainians were under the Soviet Union.
Many of these songs were popularized by the Ukrainian-American singer Kvitka Cisyk, herself a member of Plast. Her music are…

About

A place for me to collect and share traces of the past before they are forgotten or disappear forever. The focus is on remnants of the past found in the urban landscape, especially in Lviv / Львів / Lwów / Lemberg, but also in language, music, etc.